Do not write anything funny on your checks. You may render them void.

I know of what I speak. I have a friend, we’ll call him Ken Latke, who also happens to be my landlord. (I don’t know whether Ken actually likes latkes, but I suppose it doesn’t matter much, since that’s not his real name.) Now it’s always a bit odd to address a check to a friend, but when you’re called upon to do so on a monthly basis, it gets eerie. You begin to suspect that your erstwhile friend might begin to succumb to the corruption of cash: he might smile more and laugh less, demand a prefix, wear ties, even turn Republican. Or Democrat. A friend’s name doesn’t belong on the To: line. At least not unadorned. Besides, why is the line so darn long anyhow?

Thus, to lighten the mood and also conserve paper, by not wasting it, I took to appending fitting titles. There was To: Ken Latke, Master of the House. This must have intimidated the bank teller; he or she raised not a squawk. Not that I’d dreamed that they might. But when last month’s rent was addressed to Ken Latke, Master of Revels, that, it seems, was unacceptable. They refused to cash the check.

Yes, an actual bank teller refused to cash a local check because it was addressed to someone with the title Master of Revels.

I don’t care how many times your boss makes you watch Catch Me If You Can. That’s ridiculous. It also taxes the mind; how exactly is appending Master of Revels to your forged name going to enhance the overall effort at the fraud? One of the sterner requirements of the forgery trade is a strict modesty over one’s art. As I read recently about programmers who write proprietary code, theirs is a craft that must be enjoyed in solitude. Had Mr. Latke labored to forge my admittedly somewhat legible handwriting on a pilfered check, he would indeed have opened an amazing new era in his craft if, unable to contain his expectant enthusiasm, he had boldly titled himself with an eye to his forthcoming profits.

Of course, if mine was the only signature he’d mastered, the revels wouldn’t have lasted long. He would almost have deserved at least the proceeds of that one check for his trouble, along with some paternal advice to follow the example of his great Catch Me If You Can mentor, who in real life eclipsed his profits as a lone forging thief by later devising anti-forgery techniques for major corporations. He did what he did best, and left the actual thieving to the professionals—his clients.

Meanwhile, the non-forging, non-thieving, non-reveling Ken came home with a dud check, and I meekly printed a new check in my neatest block capitals. Here I must add that the teller and Ken had claimed they couldn’t quite read the word Revels. At first glance, this might seem to exonerate the teller. I deny it. Ken’s name was clear enough, which was all the evidence necessary to convict him as the true recipient. Furthermore, Master of was also quite clear, and when Ken got home he discerned the final word with little trouble. Surely that teller deposits checks every day with names that are nearly illegible; the refusal here was because someone had dared to write something after the name in the Designated Name Place.

I had to be content with writing Ken’s title in the For: box, which I shall henceforth term the Humor Protection Zone. That little zone is a guarded pasture on the sideline, like the picket zones during a Presidential visit; a decoration for those who need such things, but clearly of no actual importance compared to the bedrock reality of our lives: business. Business is business (whatever business may be), and nothing else. Ideally I would have signified myself and Ken with our Social Security numbers, but if we must use such anachronisms as names, let us not festoon each other with unprofitable garlands of disturbing imagery, as if we were men, and more than the sum of our accounts. Not during a business transaction. Mammon forbid.